Italian Unification
Italian Unification The Italian unification also called the Italian Risorgimento is the series of political and military events that led to a united Italian Peninsula under the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. The Italian Unification can be separated into five (5) stages. There was the Pre-Revolutionary, Revolutionary, Cavour’s Policy and the Role of Sardinia, Garibaldi’s Campaign in Southern Italy, and the creation of the Italian Kingdom. Before 1850 Italy was divided politically and was a battle ground for the great powers of Europe. This was the first stage which was referred to as the Pre-Revolutionary stage. This stage was after the Napoleonic war and Napoleon Bonaparte’s second defeat. The major powers met up at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and reorganized the Italian Peninsula in terms of who owned where. The northern provinces of Lombardy and Venetia was given to Austria, Kingdom of Sardinia got Piedmont and was under the rule of an Italian Monarch, Tuscany shared north-central Italy with smaller states and Italy and Rome were ruled by the papacy while a Bourbon King ruled Naples and Sicily. During this time, the Italian Peninsula was divided and Italian leaders had limited power and influence. After 1815 the goal of a unified Italian nation captured the imagination of many Italians, but there was no agreement on how it could be achieved (McKay, Hill, Buckler, Ebrey, Beck, Crowston, Weisner, 2007). The next stage was the Revolutionary Stage. In the early 19th century only those of great wealth or intellectual ability took the cause for unification. And so they formed secret societies, namely the Carbonari. The Carbonari (Charcoal Burner) were secret groups of revolutionary societies that were founded in early 19th century Italy and were the main source of opposition to the conservative regimes in Italy ("Carbonaro (italian secret," 2012). By 1820, the Carbonari were involved in many failed revolutions which were crushed by the Austrian Empire. The
References: Carbonaro (italian secret society). (2012). Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/95106/Carbonaro McKay, J., Hill, B., Buckler, J., Ebrey, P., Beck, R., Crowston, C., & Weisner- Hanks, M. (2007). A History of World Societies. (9th ed.). New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Co. Parmar, Siddhartha , Upekesha Addagatla , Athilakshmi Srinivasan, and Parmar Kartik. "Unification of Italy." ThinkQuest : Library. N.p., 3 Apr. 2003. Web. 23 Oct. 2012. < http://library.thinkquest.org/TQ0312582/unification.html >